How does HN decide which stories are on the front page? No offense to OP, but your issue was trivial (you live in a remote place, and shopping for things that Walmart doesn’t tend to carry in stores). Is there some sort of up weighting for “Ask HN” posts? I’m seeing it only has 5 votes, whereas others have hundreds…
Again just curious, hope this isn’t perceived as rude.
Edit: now it has even more votes but sits at the bottom of page 2?
Edit: and now appears to have disappeared completely.
I think it's a ratio of votes to time. I think as little as 4 votes can get something on the homepage if they come in fairly quickly.
The source code for hn is available if you want to go and look up the specifics. I'm not sure if this is the most up-to-date mirror, but the site doesn't change that often: https://github.com/wting/hackernews